In essays that question how the human sciences, particularly anthropology and psychoanalysis, articulate their fields of study, Crapanzano addresses nothing less than the enormous problem of defining the self in both its individual and collective projections.

The ingenious ways dilemmas are addressed in non-Western traditions Dilemmas explores some of the most pressing existential problems of our times, from climate change, political conflict, and social injustice, to balancing one’s own needs against those of others. Pushing back against the tendency to think of dilemmas as clear-cut binary choices, renowned anthropologist Michael Jackson shows us some of the ingenious ways that dilemmas are addressed in non-Western thought and oral traditions, as well as in Western philosophy. Drawing on examples from myth, literature, and his extensive ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa and Aboriginal Australia, each of thirteen chapters examines a particular dilemma and how it is experienced, circumvented, or reimagined. From the struggles of the Aboriginal people of Central Australia for land rights to Walter Benjamin’s harrowing journey across the Pyrenees as he fled German-occupied France in 1940; from the story of a suburban family in Aotearoa New Zealand adjusting to life in a commune to the dilemmas of migrants from the Global South trying to reconcile their search for a better life with their longing for home—Jackson interweaves philosophical reflections, insights from his anthropological fieldwork, and individual life stories. In striking a balance between our contradictory impulses to be both apart from and together with others, Jackson makes a case against identitarian essentialism, showing us how the oppositional thinking through which we often frame our contemporary dilemmas may be overcome.

Arguing for a recognition of the contradictory and ambivalent identifications that both attract and repel those who live the social category "girl," Marnina Gonick analyzes the discourses and practices defining female sexuality, embodiment, relationship to self and other, material culture, use of social space, and cultural-political agency and power. Based on a school-community project involving collaborative production of a video which tells the stories of several fictional girl characters, Gonick examines the contradictory and textured structure of the discourses available to girls through which their identities are negotiated. Woven throughout the book is the integral concern with the way in which ethnographic writing as a discursive practice is also implicated in the production and signification of social identities for girls.

A wide variety of texts (from chronicles to Chaucer) studied for evidence of medieval attitudes towards the processes of change as they affected individuals at all points of their lives.

In today's media-saturated world, identities are no longer built solely within the close-knit communities of family, neighborhood, school, and work. Today media are part of our world and therefore play an important role in the formulations of our identities or constructions of self. In a truly postmodern mode, Constructing the Self in a Mediated World not only brings together the usually segregated areas of interpersonal and mass communication but also incorporates works from scholars in sociology, psychology, and women's studies as well. Each essay examines our understanding of self in a different context of mediated culture within a specific framework of interpretive theories such as critical theory, social constructionist theory, and feminism. This volume provides insights into issues of self and identity in contemporary mediated culture. Designed for advanced students and experienced researchers in communication (both media and interpersonal), sociology, psychology, and women's studies. Constructing the Self in a Mediated World raises important questions and contributes greatly to its field.

This book focuses on anthropological questions and methods, and is offered as a supplement to textbooks on the anthropology of religion. It is designed to help students collecting and interpreting their own fieldwork or archival data and relating their findings to the work of others.

Cultural Anthropology: Global Forces, Local Lives is an exceptionally clear and readable introduction that helps students understand the application of anthropological concepts to the contemporary world and everyday life. It provides thorough treatment of key subjects such as colonialism and post-colonialism, ethnicity, the environment, cultural change, economic development, and globalization. This fourth edition has a fresh thematic focus on the future, with material relating to planning, decision-making, design and invention, hope, and waiting. More space is devoted to contemporary topics, and there is new coverage of subjects ranging from white nationalism, right-wing populism, and natural disasters to surgical training, hacker conferences, and the gig economy. Each chapter contains a rich variety of case studies that have been updated throughout. The book includes a number of features to support student learning, including: A wealth of color images Definitions of key terms and further reading suggestions in the margins Questions for discussion/review and boxed summaries at the end of every chapter An extensive glossary, bibliography, and index. Additional resources are provided via a comprehensive companion website.

Is culture simply a more or less set text we can learn to read? Since the early 1970s, the notion of culture-as-text has animated anthropologists and other analysts of culture. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban present this stunning collection of cutting-edge ethnographies arguing that the divide between fleeting discursive practice and formed text is a constructed one, and that the constructional process reveals "culture" to those who can interpret it. Eleven original essays of "natural history" range in focus from nuptial poetry of insult among Wolof griots to case-based teaching methods in first-year law-school classrooms. Stage by stage, they give an idea of the cultural processes of "entextualization" and "contextualization" of discourse that they so richly illustrate. The contributors' varied backgrounds include anthropology, psychiatry, education, literary criticism, and law, making this collection invaluable not only to anthropologists and linguists, but to all analysts of culture.

This volume of Danish Yearbook of Philosophy contains articles read as papers at the Symposium on Social Constructivism held in Copenhagen in 1992.

The concept of culture is troublingly vague and, at the same time, hotly contested, and law's relations to culture are as complex, varied and disputed as the concept of culture itself. The concept of the traditional, unified, reified, civilizing idea of culture has come under attack. The growth of cultural studies has played an important role in redefining culture by including popular culture and questions of social stratification, power and social conflict. Law and legal studies are relative latecomers to cultural studies. As scholars have come to see law as not something apart from culture and society, they have begun to explore the connections between law and culture. Focusing on the production, interpretation, consumption and circulation of legal meaning, these scholars suggest that law is inseparable from the interests, goals and understandings that deeply shape or compromise social life. Against this background, Law in the Domains of Culture brings the insights and approaches of cultural studies to law and tries to secure for law a place in cultural analysis. This book provides a sampling of significant theoretical issues in the cultural analysis of law and illustrates some of those issues in provocative examples of the genre. Law in the Domains of Culture is designed to encourage the still tentative efforts to forge a new interdisciplinary synthesis, cultural studies of law. The contributors are Carol Clover, Rosemary Coombe, Marjorie Garber, Thomas R. Kearns, William Miller, Andrew Ross, Austin Sarat, and Martha Woodmansee. Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College. Thomas R. Kearns is William H. Hastie Professor of Philosophy, Amherst College.